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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

He's still wrong on most of them, whether you strongly disagree or not.

1. This one is so mushy, it's wrong just because of it. Substituting your favourite representation format (JSON instead of XML) doesn't make it any better or really anything to do with databases.

2. It's happening if you think EC2, Github and Heroku are somehow comparable. Also which one of these is making 'a lot of money' as predicted?

3. Your response doesn't actually address the prediction. Also, Clojure, Erlang, blah blah.

4. Just hasn't happened.

5. See above.

6. And Twitter and 'a new internet community hangout will appear' in 5 years is the most solid bet you can make on the internet.

7. It happened to be 5 years out or under. Oh well.

8. Nobody, statistically, pays Google for anything. Other than adwords.

9. Straight out wrong.

I think that easily qualifies for 'wrong on most of them'.

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Regarding 1:

* XML is the most popular vehicle for representing loosely-structured, heirarchical data. Relational databases can't do this very well. ...XML can be mapped straightforwardly to the objects and data structures of modern programming languages, so it works better than relational modeling for serializing things like object graphs.*

While his estimate of market share is off (he suggested >50%), he was right about the future popularity of document databases. The only thing he got wrong was the specific serialization format.

So he was wrong on the market share, the format, and the everything else. I think that's still a solid 'completely wrong'. He is, of course, right, about every single thing you choose to read into the statements that he doesn't actually make. I don't see him predicting the 'future popularity of document databases'.

From his article: Many common types of data are intrinsically heirarchical and loosely structured, so storing them in an RDBMS can be difficult. Examples: books, articles, and most other written documentation. HTML. Search indexes. Filesystems. Game worlds. Classical music scores. It's just easier to model some things this way.

I don't see how to interpret this as anything other than a document database. Could you explain to me?

Sure. Let's take another look at the article -

"Prediction #1: XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011."

It's still completely wrong. I don't see how to interpret it as anything other than wrong. Yes we can sift carefully through it to find some way in which it's kind of, maybe right, sort of. We're discussing Steve Yegge's actual predictions not whether filesystems or the Library of Congress are really a special case of document databases.

You are arguing syntax, I'm arguing semantics. {"foo" : 25, "bar" : 32} is just not significantly different from <foo>25</foo><bar>32</bar> in my view (and I imagine in his view as well).

I think we should just agree to disagree on this one.

Its kind of like astrology - they are almost all right if you want them to be right.

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